Flight Flemish
What is the meaning of the poem, "Lady with a Falcon" by May Sarton?
What is the meaning/ analysis of this poem:
Lady with a Falcon
Flemish tapestry, fifteenth century
Gentleness and starvation tame
The falcon to this lady’s wrist.
Natural flight hooded from blame
By what ironic fate or twist?
For now the hunched bird’s contained flight
Pounces upon her inward air,
To plunder that mysterious night
Of poems blooded as the hare.
Heavy becomes the lady’s hand,
And heavy bends the gentle head
Over her hunched and brooding bird
Until it is she who seems hooded.
Lady, your falcon is a peril.
IS starved, is mastered, but not kind.
The bird who sits your hand so gentle,
The captured hunter hunts your minds.
Better to stare the senseless wind
Than wrist a falcon’s stop and start:
The bolt of flight you thought o bend
Plummets into your inmost heart.
May Sarton is looking at a fifteenth century tapestry of a flemish woman with a falcon on a jess (the lead you keep a falcon on, when it is not hunting). She says that the falcon has been tamed, and is not being allowed to be a real falcon. And the woman has also been tamed. The falcon belongs to the woman, the woman belongs to her man (she must do, this is the middle ages).
May Sarton is telling the lady in the tapestry that she ought to look at her falcon and realise that she is just as much a pet as the falcon is:
Lady, your falcon is a peril.
IS starved, is mastered, but not kind.
The bird who sits your hand so gentle,
The captured hunter hunts your minds.
Very bad poets often see a poem as a quiet area where they can sit in judgment on people who can't answer back (the lady in the tapestry isn't going to get a chance to put her side of this story).
May Sarton has invented a medieval lady with a falcon so that she can bully her in this poem.
It isn't a very nice thing to do. But weak people enjoy the chance to be bullies when they get it.
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